Krampus: The Yule Lord (35 page)

A light still shone from the upper floor in the General’s office. Dillard walked quickly across the bay and up the stairs. The door stood open. He peered in
. This is wrong, everything about this is wrong.
Nothing appeared touched, no rifled drawers, no damage to the safe, and he found no sign of the General, either. Dillard decided they’d probably taken the man with them—extortion perhaps, or maybe just for the pleasure of torturing him to death.

Tough titties for him,
Dillard thought.
Got my own problems.
He glanced back down at the bodies.
Like how the hell I’m ever gonna cover up this clusterfuck?
Again, he felt his heart speed up, that pain in his chest.
Wait.
I’m overthinking it. Maybe I don’t need to cover anything up? Might just be the blessing I’ve been praying for.
He nodded.
Solve a lot of problems. Especially one big one by the name of Sampson Ulysses Boggs. Don’t have to worry about his erratic behavior no more, about him blowing everything and taking me down with him
.
And . . . and since every dumbshit he had working for him is laying down there with their guts torn out, there ain’t a soul left needing to be shut up. All I gotta do now is . . . shit . . . no.
He shook his head. “Jesse. There’s that goddamn Jesse.”
And Jesse will talk. Oh boy will Jesse talk. Tell them everything he knows about me and then some.
Of course that’s assuming they bring him in alive. What are the chances of that?
Dillard didn’t know, but he didn’t like loose ends. He liked things all tidied up, just like his color-coordinated Tupperware bowls—bowls on the shelf, lids in the lid drawer.

“I gotta find that boy. Gotta get to him before someone else does. Gotta shut him up for good.” Dillard headed out, made it to the bottom of the stairs, and stopped, his face clouded.
There’s two other complications, aren’t there?
If they brought Jesse in alive and Linda and Abigail collaborated his story. Hell, even if they didn’t bring Jesse in. Linda could hang him. With the General gone, she might just come forward on her own. If they called in them Internal Affairs boys, he’d sure have a lot of explaining to do. He just couldn’t afford to have anyone raising suspicions, period.
Can’t just make Linda and Abigail disappear, not that easy.
No, he’d managed to get rid of one wife without raising a stink, but having two women mysteriously disappear from his life wouldn’t sit well with folks. Add a little girl to that and someone was bound to catch on.

Dillard’s eyes raced back and forth across all the carnage. “Fuck.” His chest began to tighten again. He found Ash staring at him, staring on and on without blinking, his mouth torn into something resembling a smile, not a mocking smile but the smile of someone who knows the answer to a riddle before you do. “What? What is—” Dillard’s mouth clamped shut. He nodded slowly. He got it, and it was a doozy. All at once he found himself smiling back.

“So, Ash, correct me if I’m wrong, but the last I heard was that Jesse’s running with a bunch of murderous maniacs. If, say, Linda and Abigail turned up dead, victims of a savage home invasion. People would have no problem believing that, would they? Whaddaya say, Ash? Makes perfect sense don’t you think? An estranged husband full of jealous rage.” Dillard nodded. “Then all I got to do is lead them to you and your dead pals here. Folks will make the connection real fast. Why, it’ll all fit together like a pretty puzzle. No one would suspect my hand in any of it. Nope, they’d be too busy feeling sorry for me.”

He slipped on his gloves and headed back down to the shop. He found a plastic bag and gathered a roll of duct tape, a knife, a few tools, and left, wiping down the doorknobs, careful to smear his boot tracks as he went, to clean the blood from his soles in the slush. He planned on coming back, to be the one to call it in. Because it would be best for him to be the one that discovered the crime scene, the easiest way to explain any evidence he might’ve left behind. But it never hurt to be too careful, to keep things tidy, just like his Tupperware.

He opened the door on Jesse’s truck, popped the glove compartment, and added a few of Jesse’s things to the sack, some evidence to leave behind for the forensic team. He climbed back into his cruiser, got the engine running, sat there until the window defrosted, then drove off, heading for home.

I
T WAS APPROACHING
dusk when Jesse awoke. He sat up fast, surprised that he’d slept so long, so soundly. He found Isabel and Lacy sitting at a makeshift table with a bag of oranges, a lump of cheese, a jug of milk, and a few king-size biscuits before them. Lacy peeped out from beneath the panda cap, wearing a milk mustache and munching away on a biscuit. Jesse guessed Krampus must’ve snatched the food from someone’s kitchen using the sack, probably someone they’d visited. He wondered if by chance that someone had been lucky enough to witness Krampus’s disembodied arm plucking food off their counter. Jesse looked for Krampus, but saw only Chet and Vernon curled up on the pews, and the lame wolf over by the potbellied stove.

“They went to bury him,” Isabel said.

Jesse nodded and hoped that getting your chest blown wide-open wasn’t the only way out of this madness. He tugged his boots back on, feeling the deep ache in his hands. He wiggled his fingers. They were almost back to normal. He sucked in a deep breath, felt a twinge in his chest and back from the knife wound, but was breathing fine now. He noticed that his skin had grown darker, that as the healing effects of Krampus’s blood took hold, so, too, did the outward changes. He crawled to his feet and strolled over, noticing a pie pan full of bloody lead pellets sitting next to the stove. “They get ’em all out?”

“What?”

“The buckshot . . . from Krampus’s shoulder?”

Isabel followed his eyes to the pan. “Think so.”

A bright red bow sat atop Isabel’s head. Jesse noticed two more stuck on the back of her jacket, one on the milk jug, and at least half a dozen all over Lacy. He spied a couple of bags of peel-and-stick bows, along with several rolls of old wrapping paper spilling out of one of the cardboard boxes. Jesse smirked.

The little girl regarded him timidly. She looked better, her eyes alert, some color to her face, but Jesse knew that such emotional scars ran deep, wondered if this girl would carry them the rest of her life, hoped she’d be lucky and her mind would suppress the worst of it. He sighed, knowing that was rarely the case, that more often than not the cycle of abuse and dependency just kept going round. Jesse slid a box over and took a seat next to her.

“Hey, kiddo, how you doing?”

The girl shrugged and scooted closer to Isabel. Isabel put an arm around her, gave her a squeeze. Jesse noted the way Isabel looked at the girl, wondered how well she would take it when it came time to give her up. Jesse tugged one of the furry panda ears, pulling the cap down over Lacy’s eyes. “Like that cap, don’t you?”

The girl pushed the cap up and nodded shyly.

Jesse plucked the red bow off the milk jug and stuck it on the tip of his nose. “You got any kin around?” he asked. “Y’know someone who might take you in?”

The girl glanced up at Isabel, her face troubled.

Isabel gave Jesse a warning look and rubbed the girl’s back. “Don’t you worry, doll. No one’s gonna be taking you anyplace you don’t wanna go.”

Jesse shrugged. “All right then . . . that settles that.” He plucked the bow from his nose, sat it atop his head. “Lacy, any chance you’d be willing to share one of them
gi-normous
biscuits with me?”

Lacy nodded and handed him one.

“Hey, Lace, watch what I can do.” Jesse opened his mouth as wide as he could and crammed the biscuit in. He stared at her with his cheeks puffed and lips taut about the girth of the biscuit. She gave Isabel a quick, unsure glance, then Jesse began chewing, snorting, grunting, and making piggy noises.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Isabel asked, her nose wrinkled in disgust. To which Jesse burst out laughing, blowing biscuit crumbs across the table and into Isabel’s lap.

“Oh, yuck,” Isabel cried, but Lacy’s entire face lit up and she laughed and giggled the way a little girl was supposed to. A good laugh, Jesse thought, and felt there just might be hope for her after all. Isabel’s scowl softened to a grin. “He’s real funny, huh? A real Bozo the Clown.”

Lacy grinned back, nodding her head back and forth and side to side, and the silly way she did it so reminded Jesse of his Abigail that he felt someone had socked him in the chest. He felt the sting of tears, suddenly missing his own little girl so badly it physically hurt. Jesse pulled the biscuit from his mouth, stood up, and walked over to the window, not wanting anyone to see him blinking away his tears.
Where was Abi now? Was she safe?
He propped his elbows atop the old piano and stared out across the winter landscape, at the approaching dusk. Had Dillard found out about the massacre at the General’s? If so, what would he do about it? What lengths would he go to to cover his own involvement? Were Linda and Abigail in danger?
He won’t kill them, won’t go that far.
Jesse pushed his hand through his hair.
You’re fooling yourself. You know exactly what that man’s capable of. He’s gonna want them out of the picture, and sooner than later.
“Fuck,” Jesse whispered.

He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned.

“You’re worrying on your little girl,” Isabel said. “Aren’t you?”

He nodded. “Yeah. Do anything just to give her a big hug right now.”

“It’s hard, I know. That feeling of someone needing you and you can’t be there for them . . . can’t do nothing about it. Tears you up inside.”

Jesse looked at her, could see she needed to say something. He waited, giving her space.

“The other day . . . when I told you about trying to kill myself . . . there was more to it.”

“Thought there might be.”

“My boy . . . his name is Daniel.”

Jesse couldn’t hide his surprise, tried to understand how Isabel could possibly have a child.

“I miss him . . . every day.” She waited for him to say something, but Jesse had no idea what, not to something like that. “It wasn’t some cheap fling,” she continued. “I ain’t like that. I loved him. Loved him very much. Named his boy after him.”

Jesse nodded.

She studied him a minute. “Can be hard sometimes for folks to understand. They tend to think the worst of you.”

“I ain’t in no position to be judging anyone. Wouldn’t think no worse of you if I were.”

“I know you wouldn’t. Don’t care much what folks might think about me, not anymore, not about that anyhow. But I do want you to know why things went the way they did. Why I would leave my own baby.”

They watched Lacy take one of the biscuits over to Freki. She wasn’t much bigger than the wolf’s head. Freki sniffed the biscuit, then licked it right out of the little girl’s hand. Lacy giggled.

“I didn’t have a lot of friends,” Isabel said. “Seeing how I was a Mullins and all. Folks tended to steer clear of us Mullinses on account that mental issues ran in the family. I know it’s why my daddy ran off, because of Mama’s fits. I’d known Daniel since I was six, he was the only real friend I ever had. But that made no matter to Mama. She wouldn’t let us date. Said I was too young, and maybe I was. But that didn’t stop us. We took to sneaking around; dated in secret for near on a year. And during that whole time we didn’t do much more than kiss and hold hands. I mean Daniel made a few halfhearted advances, but he was just so shy about such things. He’d always been rather awkward, the other kids liked to tease him about it, y’know. But that’s what I liked about him . . . he was such a goof. There was such a sweetness about his way.

“Then he got drafted. Vietnam. Those bastards sent him his notice just one week after his eighteenth birthday—one goddamn week. Off he goes to Fort Bragg. And that two months he was gone to Basic, that was the longest two months of my life. The Army gave him just four days leave before he was to ship out to Vietnam and he spent most of it on a bus coming home to see me. You wanna know what he’d done while he was at Bragg?” Isabel looked at Jesse.

“Sure.”

“He’d saved up all his pay and bought me something special.” She tugged a cord out from her jacket. A gold ring hung from the end of it. “Had to hang it around my neck on account it won’t fit my finger no more. He couldn’t afford a diamond, but it
is
solid gold. And it was then, that night, after he gave me this ring, after he promised to marry me, that’s when we laid down together. We planned on getting hitched just as soon as he got back. It was our secret. A thing only between us and that made it all the more special. But things don’t always go the way folks want . . . or hope. Life ain’t like that.”

“He didn’t make it back, did he?”

“He stepped on a mine. First month he was over there. One step took him away from me forever.”

“Isabel, I’m sorry.”

“Me, too,” she said, dabbing at her eyes. She sat down on the piano bench. “So there I was, knocked up and without a man. Not the first girl to ever find herself in that predicament, but you couldn’t have told me that, not then.

“About the time they shipped his body back I was starting to show. I was so small and the baby rode high, so Mama found out soon enough and when she did, she locked me in the closet, read me Scripture through the door for two days. When she let me out she told me I was gonna have to get rid of it. I told her that was against the Bible. But Mama tended to only hear what she wanted to from the Good Book. Told me she was takin’ me to see some woman she knew over in Madison . . . a fixing woman.

“That baby was all I had left of Daniel. There weren’t no way I was gonna let ’em kill his flesh and blood. And I told her so. Made it clear she’d have to kill me first. And . . . well,” Isabel cleared her throat. “She tried . . . that woman starved me, even tried to feed me poison once. She wouldn’t let me leave the house, kept the shades down, such was her fear someone might find out.